In 16-year-old Fei's remote mountaintop Chinese village, where the entire population is deaf, there are three main jobs: artists, miners and suppliers. The responsible, fiercely loyal Fei has worked hard to make sure she and her sister, Zhang Jing, keep their high-status jobs as artists, painting the daily news. Their work, as the elders say--in sign language--is part of an "ancient and exalted tradition." It began generations earlier when their ancestors mysteriously lost their hearing, some say due to the mythical winged lion, the pixiu, looking for some peace and quiet on the mountain.
Living atop a steep, unstable mountain peak with no safe egress and no way to sustain themselves with crops or livestock, the near-starving villagers rely on the supplies sent up via zip line from the township below, in exchange for precious metals. But when the deaf villagers also begin going blind, their tiny civilization becomes more precarious than ever. Fei decides to join her forbidden childhood love, Li Wei, in his bold, dangerous quest to save the village from sure extinction... a goal made significantly more realistic by Fei's sudden, miraculous ability to hear.
In Soundless, the thrilling stand-alone fantasy by Richelle Mead (Vampire Academy and the Bloodlines series), the surreal shattering of a lifelong silence challenges readers to examine the nature of sound and its role in human communication. Myth, magic and romance underlie the suspenseful, intensely dramatic scenes of the two star-crossed lovers dodging avalanches and escaping from vigilantes of the valley kingdom that cruelly exploits the vulnerable mountain community. --Emilie Coulter, freelance writer and editor